Saturday, March 30, 2013

Inebriation may have played a pivotal role in the
formation of human society, according to speculation in a recent New York Times
column:

Luckily, from time to time, our ancestors, like other
animals, would run across fermented fruit or grain and sample it. How this
accidental discovery evolved into the first keg party, of course, is still
unknown. But evolve it did, perhaps as early as 10,000 years ago.

Current theory has it that grain was first domesticated
for food. But since the 1950s, many scholars have found circumstantial evidence
that supports the idea that some early humans grew and stored grain for beer,
even before they cultivated it for bread.

. . . Once the effects of these early brews were
discovered, the value of beer (as well as wine and other fermented potions)
must have become immediately apparent. With the help of the new
psychopharmacological brew, humans could quell the angst of defying those herd
instincts. Conversations around the campfire, no doubt, took on a new
dimension: the painfully shy, their angst suddenly quelled, could now speak
their minds.

But the alcohol would have had more far-ranging effects,
too, reducing the strong herd instincts to maintain a rigid social structure.
In time, humans became more expansive in their thinking, as well as more
collaborative and creative.

The article does make a point that ancient beers had far
less alcohol than today’s brews, and that the distillation of more potent beer
became a mere 2,000 years ago.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Ancient ruins of Pluto’s Gate ~ more colorfully known
as the “Gate to Hell” ~ is believed to have been unearthed by a team headed by Francesco
D'Andria, professor of classic archaeology at the University of Salento in
Lecce, Italy, who has been excavating the ancient Greco-Roman site of
Hierapolis for years.

D’Andria says he used ancient mythology as his guide
to locate the legendary portal to the underworld. “We found the Plutonium by
reconstructing the route of a thermal spring,” he says. “Indeed, Pamukkale'
springs, which produce the famous white travertine terraces originate from this
cave.”

Scribes like Cicero and the Greek geographer Strabo mentioned
the gate to hell as located at the ancient site in Turkey, noted Discovery, but
nobody had been able to find it until now. Strabo (64 B.C.- 24 B.C.) wrote:
“This space is full of a vapor so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the
ground. Any animal that passes inside meets instant death. I threw in sparrows
and they immediately breathed their last and fell.”

The portal to the underworld seems just as bad for
your health today. According to Discovery News, the fumes emanated from a cave
below the site, which includes ionic columns with inscriptions to Pluto and
Kore, gods of the underworld. “We could see the cave's lethal properties during
the excavation,” D’Andria says. “Several birds died as they tried to get close
to the warm opening, instantly killed by the carbon dioxide fumes.”

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

A group of scientists from archaeology to crystallography
and physics are disputing the long-held theory that a comet crashing into the
Earth some 13,000 years ago spelled doom to a group of early North American
people and ice-age beasts in the region.

Theprehistoric
Paleo-Indian group known as the Clovis culture suffered its demise at the same
time the region underwent significant climate cooling known as the Younger
Dryas.

"Despite more than four years of trying by many
qualified researchers, no unambiguous evidence has been found [of such an
event]," Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New
Mexico, tells LiveScience. "That lack of evidence is therefore evidence of
absence."

According to LiveScience:

In 2007, a team of scientists led by Richard
Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California suggested
these changes were the result of a collision or explosion of an enormous comet
or asteroid.

The theory has remained controversial, with no sign of a crater
that would have resulted from such an impact.

"If a four-kilometer [2.5-mile] comet had broken
up over North America only 12.9 thousand years ago, it is certain that it would
have left an unambiguous impact crater or craters, as well as unambiguous
shocked materials," Boslough said.

A large rock plunging into the Earth's atmosphere may
detonate in the air without coming into contact with the ground. Such an
explosion occurred in Siberia in the early 20th century; the explosive energy
of the so-called Tunguska event was more than 1,000 times more powerful than the
atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Boslough said the math doesn't add up. The object
responsible for the Tunguska event was very small, about 130 to 160 feet (40 to
50 meters) wide. The proposed North American space rock linked with the Clovis
demise is estimated to have been closer to 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) across. "The physics doesn't support the idea of
something that big exploding in the air," he said.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Today’s political strife in Syria parallels events the
fall of the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago, according
to research published recently.

The Akkadian empire thrived in the third millennium
BC, but around 2,200 BC drought hit and people fled from urban centers, leading
to collapse of the government. The entire empire faltered amidst calamities referred
to as the third-millennium Mesopotamian urban crisis.

According to Scientific American:

Until now, our understanding of the Mesopotamian
urban crisis had been based on archaeological studies of ceramic artifacts and
changes in the size of archaeological sites along with what we know about
farming practices popular at the time.

But archaeologist Ellery Frahm of the University of
Sheffield in the UK and his colleagues used geochemical techniques and rock
magnetic analyses to examine trade and the social networks associated with it
instead.

The researchers used electron microscopy and chemical
analyses to examine 97 obsidian tools excavated earlier from a site called Tell
Mozan, dating from the early Akkadian empire to several centuries after its
demise. Located in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains in northeastern Syria,
the site was known as Urkesh in antiquity, and was densely populated at the
height of the Akkadian empire.

Parallels exist to the situation in Syria today.
"Some archaeologists contend that the Akkadian Empire was brought down by
militarism and that violence ended its central economic role in the region, and
a governmental collapse is a real possibility in Syria after nearly two years
of fighting," Frahm says.

Image is Mesopotamian stela depicting the god Nanna from
around 2080 BC.

Tides represent the high and low, the ebb and flow. They're the rhythm spanning millennia and an apt image for this blog as it seeks to provide accounts linking today with ages long past. New archaeological finds and scholarly speculations help us better understand our ancestors and this small planet we've shared. And the better we understand our forebears and their environs, the better we know ourselves.

A Top History Site

Ancient Tidesis in the Top 5 favorite ancient-history blogs at Baidun Galleries, one of the world's leading dealers in rare and exquisite antiquities, located in Jerusalem. A Baidun spokesman said Ancient Tides is among "a few reputable bloggers pertaining to ancient history that we thought deserved a shout out."

Ancient Tides is the top blog in the Ancient History category at Masters in History, a portal for online degrees in History.

* * *

Ancient Tides has been called one of the top ancient history blogs by Ace Online Schools, a guide to schools, degrees and other educational programs.

* * *

Ancient Tides is listed among the "Top 100 History Blogs" by Guide to Online Schools, a portal to various online education programs.